As the Linux community gathers this week for its annual conference in San Francisco, it should be celebrating the growing popularity of open-source software. But in the back of everyone's mind instead will be an ugly legal spat that has unsettled the Linux faithful.
Advocates of open-source software are banding together in response to a growing legal threat from a small Utah software company that claims its Unix code has been copied into Linux.
Organizers of LinuxWorld are hoping the case doesn't overshadow everything else at the conference, which last year drew 150 companies and 20,000 attendees and is expected to attract similar numbers this year.
The SCO Group of Lindon, Utah, filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against IBM in March, saying it had illegally contributed code that belonged to SCO into Linux.
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